Welcome to Windows 7 Forums. Our forum is dedicated to helping you find support and solutions for any problems regarding your Windows 7 PC be it Dell, HP, Acer, Asus or a custom build. We also provide an extensive Windows 7 tutorial section that covers a wide range of tips and tricks.

No. The more partitions you have on an HDD, the less work the "head" has to do to find, move and write information. However, if you make an image backup to the same HDD to one of it's partitions (not advised) the writing process will be slower. Always install a second internal HDD in your Tower/Case. This makes creating an system backup a breeze. Windows 7 has it's own backup utility but there are many on the Internet.

Solid State Drives (SSD): You will not see any slowness in performance if you partition the SSD. There is no head or mechanical parts - just cells.

The best practice for a single OS on a system would be to have two partitions. First one for OS and second one for data.

For more than one OS (multi boot) you can have additional partitions for each OS.

For windows only system, do a cleaning of windows partition with CCleaner (Use it judiciously, you can leave out the registry cleaner in it) and a regular defrag (once in 10 days) of all the partitions should improve the system performance.

Well, that would be so for advanced users. But the gist of the topic is what a regular computer user would do with a enough knowledge to use either the snap-in "Manage" in Windows or third party software to customize their HDD or SDD.

You are absolutely right in what you said but 99% of computer owners around the world are going to install their apps/programs on the C: Drive.

Lol luckily i'm in the 1% :P. I was wondering because I have my programs in C: and my data in D: but I have been recently thinking of dividing my D: drive into two halves, one for games and whatnot, and the other for school/work, and was just wondering if it will affect the performance in any way.

Truth is, with today's processors and RAM, you just need a backup HDD or SDD and make a C: Drive backup image once or twice a week (I do it every night).

Bottom line: Run your Malware scanner, Anti-virus scanner then do a System Image Backup. You'll be so happy you did! There is even a wonderful free program out there called EaseUS Todo that has excellent features.

Do more partitions = lower performance?

Desktop performance for Windows Aero lower after Windows 7 reinstallI reinstalled my operating system. All my other performance scores are the same except performance for Aero dropped from 6.7 to 5.7.
I downloaded the drivers for my computer model from Dell and installed them in the order Dell said to. Some of the drivers didn't install, so I moved on until I...

Lower performance indice with a new motherboard with I5 and DDR3 ramHello
I installed a new I5 motherboard with DDR3 ram. My previous board had a quad Q6600 with DDR2
My past performance was 7.1, now I got a 5.9. Strange is the lower indice is from my SSD drive that came from 7.2 to 5.9.
Could it be that Windows is evaluationg a new install hard drive...

Performance & Maintenance

processor performance alot lower than i thoughthi guys i am new here so firstly let me say hello.
i have recently upgraded to windows 7, installed fine and noticed it did not perform as well as XP did, thought it was probably my system as i built it 2 years ago, so i decided to run the Windows Experience test, to see what part of my system was...

Performance & Maintenance

lower hdd performanceHello,
I've noticed a decreased performance of my hdd (seagate barracuda 7200.11 500GB Firmware SD1A) in windows 7, extracting and copying files takes longer than in vista. I'm assuming it is a win 7 /driver problem since yesterday it was running fine on vista. Also it is a lot quieter. I have...